|
|
CodeX is a multidisciplinary laboratory operated by Stanford University in association with affiliated organizations from industry, government, and academia. The staff of the Center includes a core of full-time employees, together with faculty and students from Stanford and professionals from affiliated organizations.
CodeX's primary mission is to explore ways in which information technology can be used to enhance the quality and efficiency of our legal system. Our goal is "legal technology" that empowers all parties in our legal system and not solely the legal profession. Such technology should help individuals find, understand, and comply with legal rules that govern their lives; it should help law-making bodies analyze proposed laws for cost, overlap, and inconsistency; and it should help enforcement authorities ensure compliance with the law.
Projects carried out under the CodeX umbrella typically fall into one or more of the following areas:
Legal Document Management: Legal Document Management:is concerned with the creation, storage, and retrieval of legal documents of all types, including statutes, case law, patents, regulations, etc. The $50B e-discovery market is heavily dependent on Information Retrieval (IR) technology. By automating information retrieval, cost can be dramatically reduced. Furthermore, it is generally the case that well-tuned automated procedures can outperform manual search in terms of accuracy. CodeX is investigating various innovative legal document management methodologies and helping to facilitate the use of such methods across the legal spectrum. Legal Infrastructure: Some CodeX projects focus on building the systems that allow the stakeholders in the legal system to connect and collaborate more efficiently. Leveraging advances in the field of computer science and building upon national and international standardization efforts, these projects have the potential to provide economic and social benefits by streamlining the interactions of individuals, organizations, legal professionals and government as they acquire and deliver legal services. By combining the development of such platforms with multi-jurisdictional research on relevant regulations issued by governments and bar associations, the Center supports responsible, forward-looking innovation in the legal industry. Computational Law: Computational law is an innovative approach to legal informatics based on the explicit representation of laws and regulations in computable form. Computational Law techniques can be used to "embed" the law in systems used by individuals and automate certain legal decision making processes or in the alternative bring the legal information as close to the human decision making as possible. The Center's work in this area includes theoretical research on representations of legal information, the creation of technology for processing and utilizing information expressed within these representations, and the development of legal structures for ratifying and exploiting such technology. Initial applications include systems for helping individuals navigate contractual regimes and administrative procedures, within relatively discrete e-commerce and governmental domains.
|
|
